Gary Larson was born August 14, 1950, in Tacoma, Washington. Always
drawn to nature, he and his older brother spent much of their youth
exploring the woods and swamps of the Pacific Northwest, and the
tidelands and waters of Puget Sound.
Though he loved to draw as a child, Larson didn’t formally study
art, nor did he consider being a cartoonist. He graduated in 1972
from Washington State University with a degree in communications
but took many classes in the sciences. In 1990, Larson received the
Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award and was the centennial
commencement speaker. His talk was titled “The Importance of Being
Weird.” His interest in science was a frequent topic in many of The
Far Side® cartoons, which he created for fifteen years, from
January 1, 1980, to January 1, 1995.
In 1985, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
premiered a collection of four hundred of Larson’s originals in The
Far Side® of Science exhibit, which later traveled to science
venues across North America, including the Smithsonian Institution
and the American Museum of Natural History. In 1988, Harvard
professor Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent science writer and a
member of the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, dubbed
Larson “the national humorist of natural history” in his foreword
to The Far Side® Gallery 3.
In another fitting tribute, the scientific community named a
chewing louse after Larson (Strigiphilus garylarsoni), and
paleontologists refer to the distinctive array of previously
unnamed tail spikes on a stegosaurus as the “thagomizer,” thanks to
one of his cartoons.
Larson’s work on The Far Side® has earned him numerous awards,
including the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year
from the National Cartoonists Society in 1990 and 1994. The
National Cartoonists Society also named Larson Best Syndicated
Panel Cartoonist in both 1985 and 1988. In 1993, The Far Side® was
awarded the Max and Moritz Award for Best International Comic
Strip/Panel by the International Comic Salon.
In 1994, Larson debuted a twenty-two-minute version of his first
animated film, Gary Larson’s Tales From The Far Side®, as a
Halloween special on CBS television, and it quickly became a cult
favorite. The film won the Grand Prix at the 1995 Annecy
International Animated Film Festival in France. That film and its
sequel, Gary Larson’s Tales From The Far Side® II, were selected
for numerous international film festivals, including Venice,
Brussels, and Telluride, and were broadcast in various foreign
countries. Both were produced with traditional cel animation,
completely hand-inked and painted.
Music has also been an important part of Larson’s life. He started
playing the guitar at an early age, moved to the banjo for a few
years, and then ultimately returned to the guitar. Since retiring
from daily newspaper syndication, Larson has focused his creative
efforts on the guitar and his passion for jazz.
At the end of its run, The Far Side® appeared in nearly two
thousand newspapers. It in turn spawned twenty-three The Far Side®
books, including sixteen collections, five anthologies, and two
retrospectives, twenty-two of which appeared on the New York Times
Best Sellers list. Over the years, more than forty-one million
books and seventy-nine million calendars have been sold, and The
Far Side® has been translated into more than seventeen
languages.
As for his inspiration, Larson often cites his family’s “morbid
sense of humor” growing up and how his older brother loved to scare
him whenever he got the chance. He was also once quoted as saying,
“You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always
thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just
give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again.” He
attributes much of his success to the caffeine in the coffee he
drinks daily.
Larson currently lives in the coffee capital of the United
States—Seattle, Washington—with his wife, Toni.
Copyright © 2019 FarWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. The Far Side®
and the Larson® signature are registered trademarks of FarWorks,
Inc. in certain countries.
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